Saturday, March 25, 2017

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Global Warming?

I mentioned in my last post that there were several controversial topics that I had never covered, and I promised to rectify that. Well, as they say there’s no time like the present. You can probably guess from the title which topic that will be. Yes, the first subject I’m going to tackle is global warming. I probably don’t need to point out that this is a controversial topic, so I expect to get some flack, but I go where the truth takes me! Or at least where my completely subjective, inadequately informed, culturally biased perception of the truth takes me…

I’m not the only one who's been talking about global warming recently, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who I’ve mentioned in this space before, has been spending a significant amount of time on it as well. Before going farther, I know that many people think Scott Adams has gone off the deep end. And I, personally, am a little bit tired of his repeated references to persuasion and hypnotism. Also, I think he sometimes engages in the bias of massaging his predictions after the fact to make them look better, but you know what? He would be the first to admit that he’s biased, and that he has biases he’s not even aware of. And whether or not he massages his predictions, he still called it for Trump over a year in advance, of the election, when very few people were. In other words, if we’re looking at whose side everyone is on in whatever weird battle is currently taking place, I think I’m on Adams’ side (particularly if there are only two sides.)

I bring Adams up because he’s been hammering home a point that I think is critical to understanding the issues and policy associated with global warming, i.e. it may be less about the facts and more about which side is the better persuader. Now, Adams is an absolute fiend for persuasion (as I said I’m a little sick of it) and so he would say something like this, but despite that I think he makes a very important and frequently overlooked point, in short, that global warming advocates may have overshot the mark.

In order to understand why that might be the case we need to begin by defining what global warming is. This may seem like an unnecessary first step, but the problem is that one of the ways in which advocates have overshot the mark is by bundling everything together, and in order to understand things we have to first unbundle the various assumptions if we really want to know what’s going on. The best way to do this is through a series of questions.

The first and most basic question: Is the Earth getting hotter? Much of the debate about global warming occurs at this level. On the one side you’ll see headlines like February 2017: Earth's 2nd Warmest February and 4th Warmest Month in Recorded History. And on the other side you might see someone claim that there was no appreciable warming from February 1997 through November of 2015. This is the debate about whether any global warming is actually happening. For my own part I’m convinced that it is. The evidence is substantial. But as usual the point is not to convince you to agree with me, but to dissect things in such a way that you understand it better.

At this level what is frequently happening is what Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow called the substitution fallacy (also the Masked-Man fallacy), where people substitute an easy question for a hard question. The hard question is “Should we completely remake the world economy to prevent global warming?” That’s a really difficult question, so people substitute, “Is the Earth getting warmer?” That’s an easier question to answer. And of course it should be pointed out that some people go one step farther to, “Did summer seem especially hot?” Often the substitution happens as the question is being asked. It’s far more common to hear, “Should we do something about global warming?” Than any questions involving carbon pricing or emission sequestration. And of course we should probably do something, but that’s pretty broad.

Once we’ve determined that yes, the Earth is getting hotter, the next question is, is it getting hotter because of human activity? The background temperature of deep space is -455 degrees fahrenheit. The average temperature of the Earth is around 57 degrees fahrenheit. Which means that the sun provides 512 degrees of warmth. If the average temperature of the earth goes up to 59 degrees, it’s not insane to argue that perhaps the warmth of the sun increased by 0.005%. I used to see arguments along these lines fairly often, but I haven’t seen them recently. I think the consensus is that the Earth is getting warmer, and humans are causing it through the release of massive amounts of carbon dioxide. That’s certainly where I would put my money. Still how often do you see anyone try and separate warming from human activity. I think 99.5% of people don’t make any distinction between the two, and they’re probably totally correct not to, but you can see from even the short example I gave that it’s not ridiculous to do so.

Third, is global warming a bad thing? Or more specifically are the downsides to a warmer planet worse than the upsides? Not all change is bad. If manna started falling from heaven, ending world hunger, then despite the potential increase in obesity I think people would argue, that on the balance, it was a good thing. As far as global warming goes, we hear about a lot of bad things, the flooding of coastal cities, a plague of tropical diseases, worse hurricanes, etc. But we don’t hear much about any benefits. Is it possible that global warming is 100% bad, that everything gets worse with rising temperature? I suppose so, but that seems unlikely. There’s probably some benefits. I completely understand why none of the advocates would want to mention any potential benefits, but there are almost certainly a few of them.

I just recently read a book called Twilight of Abundance. I know someone, somewhere recommended it to me, but I’m not even sure who it was. I probably wouldn’t recommend it, but it was interesting. The author, David Archibald, is a global warming skeptic, and a Malthusian. His big worry is that you have lots of countries, with serious population growth, which already import from half to 90% of their food. And therefore the biggest problem, in his opinion, is feeding those people. He doesn’t believe global warming is happening, but if it is, he thinks it would be a good thing, particularly if it increased the amount of arable land in places like Siberia. As I said I don’t think I’d recommend the book, but I also don’t think his opinions are so out there that they’re not even worth mentioning. Bill Gates was quoted as saying something broadly similar in an article about global warming a while back when he mentioned that if we don’t do something we’ll end up running the “2-degree experiment”. In other words no one is 100% sure what will happen when temperatures go up, it’s an experiment. I totally agree that it would be better if we didn’t conduct the experiment at all, but I think it’s implausible that rising temperatures won’t bring any benefits.

Fourth, now that we’ve established that the planet is warming, humans are causing it, and it’s a net bad thing, we have to ask, “How Bad?” If unchecked global warming will unquestionably cause humanity’s extinction, then that calls for far more extreme measures, than if it’s just going to cause everything to have to move a few more meters above sea level. Obviously, I don’t want to minimize the disruption caused by a sea level rise of several meters, but it’s not the same thing as the end of humanity. And we shouldn’t treat it the same way either. The third question, essentially asked, should we do anything? This fourth question asks how much should we do. If it means the end of humanity then nothing is off limits. But if it’s not that bad then the question of what we should do becomes a lot more complex.

Beyond this point there are other ways to break the issue down. We might ask what the US and China should be doing vs. what countries in Sub-Saharan Africa should be doing. We might get into the fact that sea levels could actually fall in certain places. Or we might get into minutia, like Climategate or cow farts. But I think we’ll stop it here. The key thing I wanted to illustrate was that when people speak of global warming they generally combine all four of these questions into a single assertion that unless we do something radical, anthropogenic human warming will cause the end of humanity. And maybe it will. You know I’m very careful about predicting the future. But if we’re going to speak intelligently about global warming it’s important to examine the various links in the chain. Too many people translate “February temperatures reach record high” into “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!” And the two are not remotely the same thing.

This is something of a tangent, but before we go any farther it’s important to talk about climate change denial. By not immediately denouncing all denial as a crime akin to torturing kittens, and in fact even using the word “interesting” to describe some of the ideas, certain people may be assuming that I should be considered a “denier” as well. If that’s what you think, I doubt anything I can say will change your mind, which is too bad because reasonable disagreements and debates are one of the best ways to get at the truth, and that can’t happen if we only have access to one side. I would allow that there are certain situations of extreme emergency where debate has to be suspended, but I don’t see any reason for placing global warming in that category.

In any case I think “deniers” have had minimal impact on what’s actually happened. It’s not as if some charismatic denier kept us from taking the easy and obvious steps to prevent global warming. Doing anything about global warming is difficult, costly and politically unpopular even in the absence of doubt. In order to assume deniers have done any damage you have to show me where there was some credible path to stop global warming and it failed specifically because climate change deniers swung things the other way. As in, imagine voters in the Appalachian coal country who voted against something involving global warming specifically because they thought global warming wasn’t real and not because of the far more tangible fear that the legislation might cost them their jobs. I don’t think this has ever been the case. I understand lots of people have doubts about global warming, but that’s almost never the primary reason for doing one thing rather than another. Our hypothetical residents of coal country may have had doubts about global warming in addition to their fear of unemployment, but changing their belief in global warming would not have changed their votes. In any event I reject the idea that you can’t bring up the possibility that something might be wrong. End of tangent.

Having broken down the global warming debate into these various stages, maybe you can start to see why global warming advocates may have overshot the mark, but if not let me provide a metaphor. Imagine if you gave a very difficult test to a bunch of high school students, and told them that if they got a perfect score they could go to a good college, but that if they missed even one question it would be the same as if they missed all the questions. How hard would these high school students try? Sure you might have a couple of overachievers who really gave it 100%, but most kids would check out the minute they came to a question they didn’t know. This, in my opinion, is what the current state of global warming advocacy looks like, particularly when it’s framed as an apocalyptic, extinction level event. It’s a really hard test that we have to ace. And yes there are some overachievers out there who are really trying, but most people are essentially high school students who are going to check out the minute you tell them they can’t have a hamburger.

All new cars have to be electric by 2030. Currently, electrical cars are at around 1%, at least in the US. To go from 1% to 100% in 13 years would be one of the most amazing accomplishments ever. How many people do you know that even have a purely electrical car? Now imagine that everyone you know has one…

Carbon capture has to get to five gigatons per year by 2050. In other words we have to be removing 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and putting it somewhere where it can’t escape. Currently, as best I can tell we are doing effectively zero carbon capture right now. But, by 2050, the article says, we would have to be capturing twice as much carbon as all the trees and soil on the entire planet.

In addition to perfecting carbon capture, there are a host of other technologies we’d have to invent. In particular we have to come up with a low carbon way for producing steel and concrete. We’d have to grow food with zero carbon emissions from land use. We’d have to make a huge investment in nuclear energy or invent much more effective batteries.

Finally we have to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half every decade. Currently the US, China and India are responsible for half of all emissions. Imagine that all three countries had to be completely carbon neutral by 2030. And then of course you have to halve it again in 2040, and then you have to halve it again by 2050.

All of this has to be done while at the same time the population continues to grow to 9.7 billion. As perhaps the best illustration of how difficult it is I refer you to another article also from Vox.com, where they talk about a “remarkable slowdown” in emissions. If you look at the article you’ll see that the remarkable slowdown is just emissions being flat for the last few years. If emissions need to go down by 90% while population increases by 50% then staying constant is not a “remarkable” slowdown it’s horrible.

I’ve talked about how difficult it’s going to be, but I haven’t talked about how bad it is if we fail. As I said above if this threatens the extinction of humanity we should do whatever it takes. But as far as I can tell it doesn’t. I haven’t seen a credible scenario on how global warming wipes out all of humanity. I see how it makes things really bad, how progress might be set back 50 years, and even where some people die. But I don’t see any scenario where it kills every last human. A few months ago I read the book Global Catastrophic Risks, which is a comprehensive examination of everything that might wipe out humanity, and while they have a chapter on climate change their conclusion is:

The key point to emphasize in the context of catastrophic risk is that this warming is expected to be quite smooth and stable. No existing best guess state-of-the-art model predicts any sort of surprising non-linear disruption in terms of the global mean temperature.

In other words there’s no tipping point where the Earth suddenly gets 50 degrees hotter. Further on it says:

While it’s true that a global mean temperature rise of 4℃ would probably constitute dangerous climate change on most metrics, it would not necessarily be catastrophic in the sense of being a terminal threat. The challenges they suggest our descendents will face look tough, but endurable.

If global warming is “tough but endurable” what’s really at stake? Generally when you talk about some big potential catastrophe what you’re really talking about is people dying. I am not an expert, but it doesn’t appear that global warming is bad because of all the lives that are stake. Yes, some people will die as a result of global warming whether it’s hurricanes, or tropical diseases or something else. But as I also pointed out it’s possible, maybe even likely that more people will be saved from hunger. I’ve already touched on that idea, but briefly, at a minimum we’re looking at longer growing seasons, an abundance of carbon dioxide, which plants love, and additionally, unlike how it’s often portrayed, a warmer world is a wetter world. So if people’s lives aren’t at stake, what is?

In short, progress is at stake. We’ve talked a lot about progress in this space, from the Religion of Progress, to the idea that progress has reduced deaths. We’ve also talked about how modern progress is sustained by using up the stored solar energy of millions of years in the space of a couple of centuries, which is course what causes global warming. Which means that what global warming really is, is a very costly challenge to this idea of never-ending progress. In simple terms it’s the challenge of having your cake and eating it too. This is why it’s so hard to do anything about global warming. People don’t have some higher want they’re willing to make sacrifices for. They’re not avoiding cake so they can lose weight. Global warming is essentially avoiding cake in order to maybe still have cake in 50 years. Very few people even understand that trade, and even fewer are willing to make it. Not even the people who are ostensibly very concerned with the issue (do a search for global warming and private jets).

As I say, so often I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe we will manage to do all the things I listed above. Maybe there will be hidden benefits to warming. Maybe there will be some tipping point and the world will get 50 degrees warmer all of the sudden. And maybe, just maybe the deniers are right. I don’t think so. I think global warming is happening, and I wish I knew what to do about it. But in the end it’s one more reason why the harvest is past, and the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

Solving global warming is not straightforward, or easy. If you’re looking for something easy and straightforward may I recommend donating to this blog? I’m not saying it’s a good thing, it’s just straightforward.

4 comments:

I liked your take on global warming. Certainly the issue is more complicated than people often acknowledge. One thing you didn't mention was the tipping point people most often cite when it comes to global warming: the thawing of tundra and resultant release of large amounts of methane. I don't think even that would lead to extinction level global warming, but I could see someone dismissing your analysis because of that omission. I would also add that part of over-playing their hand is the amount of certainty they attach to everything. Take the Vox article as an example, what if the tipping point isn't 2 deg C? What if they are off in their estimate of how much CO2 equates to a rise of 2 deg C? They never acknowledge any uncertainty in those numbers. On the surface one might think this strengthens their case, but I think psychologically there is something much more frightening about uncertain doom than certain doom. It's sort of like the monster unseen is scarier than the monster we see and understand. I think their case would be stronger if they frankly acknowledged that they simply can't predict what exactly will happen as atmospheric CO2 levels rise. It would also help avoid the problem of giving up because the problem seems so intractable. Maybe the risk increases if all your cars aren't electric by 2030, but you would still be better off if you got it done by 2040 than if you didn't.

I think my preferred approach would be more focused on risk management. As you point out any discussion of global warming should begin with the questions of: is the world warming and how much of that is due to human activity? But what if instead we simply acknowledge that the massive amounts of CO2 (and other chemicals) currently being released into the atmosphere represent a risk to the environment and to humanity in general. Certainly global warming would be one part of that risk, but you could also add ocean acidification and the various health affects associated with the burning of fossil fuels. You may also add in the risk of becoming reliant on an energy source that is not sustainable (although predictions of peak oil seem to be more wishful thinking than insightful prognostication at this point). Overall I think it's hard to argue that there is a risk when you artificially increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. I'd tweak Bill Gates metaphor slightly and refer to it as the 500 ppm experiment or something similar. I think taking that approach you would focus on what you could do that gives you the most bang for the buck. One thing that I really liked about the Vox article was how much it focused on the technical challenges of doing something about global warming. One of the more depressing aspects of the whole debate is how much global warming activism seems to be focused on symbolical gestures and moral preening versus actually doing the hard work to solve the issues at hand. Certainly putting up some more solar panels or buying a prius isn't going to do much to solve the underlying problem.

Excellent comment. I confess that I had a hard time fitting everything in, and I’m not sure that it ended up being as tight as I hoped. So thanks for expanding on things. I agree with everything you said.

I was aware of massive methane release being a possible extreme event. And indeed Global Catastrophic Risk, my primary reference for this particular aspect of things mentions several possible amplifications. And yet they still conclude there’s no model that ends up in a non-linear feedback loop. So while I didn’t mention precipitous methane release, it was factored into conclusion I quoted.

I also agree that there is way too much certainty. And I liked the way you put it, particularly the idea that it might be more accurate to call it a 500 ppm experiment rather than the two degree experiment. You mentioned peak oil which was one of the things that I didn’t get into either. In the end it’s a big complicated issue, that has been simplified to the point where what most people actually hear bears only the vaguest resemblance to reality.

I understand what you mean about trying to fit everything in. I really wanted to bring up the topic of nuclear power in my first comment and then realized it was too big to really cover adequately. I probably still don't have time to delve into it, but I recently read an article that I thought was interesting on molten salt reactors: http://www.businessinsider.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-sorensen-lftr-2017-2. I think my key take away from the article is that there is a lot of untapped potential with fission reactors that we should be exploring if we were really serious about global warming. Definitely nuclear power is not without risks, but I wonder how many Chernobyl or Fukushima level events you could have and still be ahead on overall environmental impact/human lives versus the coal industry. My guess is way more than we've had so far. Certainly you still have the waste problem, but again it might be easier to deal with the wast than to try to sequester a gigaton of carbon every year.

I forgot to mention that I particularly liked your discussion of what possible impact the so called climate deniers have had on implementing a solution to global warming. I agree with your take on it, they are much more convenient straw men to attack than actual impediment to the implementation of effective solutions (mostly because effective solutions would likely not be popular or easy to implement). I almost wish you could remove the deniers from the equation and then say to those constantly harping about global warming, "Okay, everyone is convinced now what are you going to do." Cap and trade? Okay how far does that get you to the final goal? Certainly you aren't going to cut CO2 emissions in half every decade for the next three decades with a cap and trade approach. Much easier to just continue to point the finger at the few people who question the "consensus".

Taleb makes an interesting point in one of his books about pollution. He basically says if you have to pollute try to have some variety. Which sounds flippant, but the point is that if you are going to end up with non-linear responses, it's going to be at the extreme end of things. As I mentioned global warming looks like a smooth, easy to understand condition in the beginning, it's way out on the end, if we get to 1,000 ppm that no one knows what's going to happen. Same with nuclear power and nuclear waste, at low levels it may not be ideal, but it's understandable and manageable. It's when we put all our eggs in one basket that we risk getting into situations that are truly terrifying. So yeah nuclear is another area I wanted to get into and it didn't happen. I'll probably have to do a second post at some point.

Thanks for the compliment on the impact of the deniers. I think a lot of it comes back to the idea that advocates have an unrealistic vision of what's possible. Nuclear power has always been one of the best bets for reducing emissions and they've consistently fought it with just as much energy as coal and oil, if not with more energy. As you say it's much easier to point the finger at the few people who bring up valid points about data collection, temperature records and the like then to work towards solutions which actually have a chance of being implemented.